With the ubiquity of mobile devices consumers want to be able to reach business anytime, anywhere. Also, they don’t want to have to tinker with browsers and apps; they just want to be able to have a quick chat with someone right now that can answer their specific queries. Shoppers want the right answers to their questions and find what they need quickly. Buyers will want to make a purchase instantly. And customers will want their problems resolved quickly by customer support teams.

This requires businesses to have the infrastructure and teams to support always-on, instant chat with a large…

Would You Like To Understand What Customers Really Want And How To Give It To Them? Then Start Conversations! Conversational Marketing Is The Latest Buzzword In Marketing

Conversational marketing is a unique and emerging marketing methodology through which brands use one-to-one conversations that are personalized in order to learn and remember customer interests through automated technology.

In short, conversational marketing is a distinctive interaction of ‘You tell me and I’ll listen’ instead of I’ll tell you and you listen’.

Why do businesses today need to consider conversational marketing?

• Customers are comfortable using conversations to express themselves
• An open conversation is…

With the rise of “conversational experiences,” just about every business function — from marketing to commerce to support — must be redesigned to be conversational. The greatest impact felt due to conversational marketing is that businesses interact with far more consumer prospects than they do with paying customers. Each one of us will soon be experiencing this as a target, if we aren’t already.

However, it’s merely the latest phase in the evolution of marketing. The earliest phase was known as “outbound marketing” and consisted of broadcasting key messages to vast audiences through media along the lines of print and…

“The messaging industry continues to evolve from Telecom messaging to IP based messaging. Chatbots enable the development of rich conversation experiences across any messaging channel. The two are very complementary.”

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to co-found an intelligent chatbot company? I am the co-founder and CEO of Gupshup. Many years ago, we saw the emergence of messaging as a platform for advanced services, not just a tool for person-to-person communication. Initially, the only messaging channel available was SMS, but today you have many other IP and voice-based messaging channels. We…

Bots and artificial intelligence (AI) are transforming every industry vertical. But the heaviest impact may well be on the financial services industry.The financial services industry is naturally ripe for disruption — because it is too important and too inefficient for the status quo to survive. The modern financial industry is built around human limitations that cause a massive information asymmetry between financial organizations and consumer. Financial organizations are armed with substantial computing capabilities while human users have limited memory, compute and time. Humans are busy or distracted — they miss payment deadlines, pay extra fees, don’t optimize their investments, etc…

Beerud Sheth, CEO of Gupshup

Bots and AI are disrupting virtually every industry vertical. One of the most impacted will be ecommerce. As bots do the shopping for humans, many old assumptions will crumble leaving massive disruption in its wake.

The current ecommerce industry is built around the assumption of the inefficient human shopper. Humans have limited memory and compute capacity. Humans are creatures of habit, favor the familiar and value convenience. Therefore, ecommerce businesses that are well known brands, that capture and retain credit cards, take fewer clicks to transact, offer automated recurring subscription fees tend to win even…

We at Gupshup are happy to announce our partnership with Google to bring voice-activated actions on Google Home. Google Home is a voice-activated speaker powered by the Google Assistant that can play music, activate smart devices, give you the latest traffic updates, and also answer certain questions.

Starting today, bot builders can use Gupshup’s tools to develop voice-activated bots for Google Home. These bots, called Actions are built for Google Assistant. …

It is really fascinating to see how chat bots can automate contextual conversational interactions. According to Casey Newton from The Verge “Bots are here, they’re learning — and in 2016, they might eat the web”, which seems to be very realistic because there are thousands of bots out there and more are being developed that increase productivity, simplify the user experience, or are just for plain entertainment.

The majority of the bots as of today are simple commands to automate daily tasks. However, Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered bots are the future — you can build natural languages as services to…